Time to get the gang back together:
Yep, after playing through RotTR I’m off to bust some ghosts. I picked this game up cheap during the last Steam Sale. It was always a sore point that I never got to play it on XB360 back in the day, so when it popped up on sale I grabbed it.
From the initial screens all is good, with the cast members in attendance & some decent animation even for such a dated title.
There’s a few things to tweak before starting:
but unfortunately no FOV slider… and this could be a definite issue from the start, I’m getting nauseous playing this game, with eye strain & that crushing migraine headache that comes with game induced motion sickness. It doesn’t help that there’s a few instances of major freezing that shouldn’t be happening on my hardware. But it’s almost forgiven when the characters start to talk.
There’s an immediate sense of familiarity, these are the Ghostbusters, the game doesn’t waste anytime introducing them, that’s what the movies are for. The four main characters (and Janine) are voiced by their actors and those characters are still the wise cracking heroes who use their intelligence and inventiveness, as opposed to super-powers, that we know. You get to play as the Rookie, the perpetually silent protagonist, an the game plays up on your mute stature by showing your character opening his mouth to answer or interject before being interrupted mercilessly or left hanging as everyone leaves the room. It works well and it shows the game is not above making fun of itself.
While the majority of the dialogue is great is still falls flat at points, but the script writer takes a scatter gun approach that relies on Peter, Ray & Egon throwing out lines of cynicism, wonder & psuedo science respectively at such a fast rate that bum notes are quickly drowned by a sea of gold.
If only the AI was as useful. Unfortunately, where their characters speak clever, they act as dumb as the New York pavement, blocking door ways, getting knocked down more times than Chumbawumba & when you’re waiting on a revive will normally wait until the enemies are launching a power attack before running over to get hit by it.
The story is great, lots of science fiction & occult references with the return of old favourites like Slimer & Mr Stay Puft. I’m about 4hrs in and fought 2 or 3 bosses so far with differing levels of frustration. Gear upgrades are tied to trapping & destroying apparitions and allow a continual stream of tweaking. The way their introduced is a weird combination of genius & clumsiness - with the new gadgets being on your back but unusable until Egon realises that he’s forgotten to tell you about them & at which point they’re unlocked.
The control scheme on Keyboard & mouse is awful… I’ll look again through the options to see if it can pick up my controller, but currently there’s a lack of fine control that annoys me & it does appear that it’s par for the course for a 3rd person perspective console port. The movement issue definitely doesn’t help with the motion sickness.
I’m not giving up because I really do want to see how the unofficial 3rd movie ends.
